Melanoma is the most aggressive and the deadliest form of skin cancer. The annual occurrence and death are 60,000 and 7000 cases, respectively in the US only. When detected at an early stage, melanoma can be treated effectively at a relatively low cost of $ 1.8K, which results in high survival rate of 95%.
In contrast, progression of the disease in the late stage is associated with poor survival rate of less than 13% and dramatically increasing treatment costs of $60K per patient or higher. As a result, 88% of the total annual melanoma treatment costs is due to 18% of late stage cases.
At this moment, however, no official melanoma screening program exists. Currently, melanoma diagnosis is performed by general practitioner based on visual criteria. However, visual screening is very dependent on the skill and experience of the physician, and is generally prone to errors and overlooking of signals that may not be obvious at the early stages of the skin disease.
Available dermatological tools, e.g. a dermascope, are only useful in the hands of experienced dermatologists, who followed a dedicated training. Yet, there is a large spread in acquired data due to not reproducible data acquisition.
Thus, there is a long-felt need for improved skin analysis tools, providing easy and unambiguous analysis of the skin, allowing for reliable early detection of melanoma, as well as other skin cancer types and other skin diseases. Such a tool would provide easy and timely diagnosis, increasing survival rate and decreasing treatment costs.
It is an object of the invention to provide a diagnosis tool for the early detection of skin diseases, in particular skin cancer, more in particular melanoma.